Question: Should we think of happiness during our meditation?

Sri Chinmoy: It is fine if you want to meditate on happiness. But if you think of the pleasure-life during your meditation and call it happiness, then it is like misusing a knife. Instead of cutting a mango and sharing it with others, you are only stabbing yourself. During your intense meditation if you are getting pleasure from undivine thoughts or cherishing wrong forces or ideas, then you are only increasing their intensity. So, be careful. When wrong thoughts come during your meditation, if you cannot control them, then just stop meditating. Go and drink a glass of water or do something else.

You have to ask yourself what you want from the spiritual life. If you want happiness, spirituality is the answer. But this happiness will come only if you are prepared to make the Supreme happy in His own Way. No matter how many ways God pleases you, you will not be happy if in one particular way you are still displeasing God. God is ready to make you happy in your own way over and over again, in hundreds of ways. But your soul's love of God is such that if in even one way you fail to please Him, your soul will not be happy. And if your soul is not happy with your body, vital, mind and heart, you yourself can never be happy. Your soul wants to be extremely, extremely, extremely proud of you. If your body, vital and mind do the wrong things, your soul tries to discipline these unruly members of its family and inspire them.

You are in the spiritual life because you want happiness. If the spiritual life did not bring happiness, who would be such a fool as to practise spirituality? When you become in tune with God's living Breath, when you enter into God's Breath and become part and parcel of it, happiness becomes your inner and outer name and you get infinite ecstasy and infinite delight.